PENNSYLVANIA - Pennsylvania will offer voluntary COVID-19 testing in K-12 schools, state health and education officials announced Monday, promoting the effort as a way to keep the doors open for in-person learning amid a statewide resurgence of the coronavirus.School districts will have to opt in, and parents must give consent to the weekly classroom testing, in which students’ nasal swabs will be pooled and evaluated together to detect the presence of COVID-19 in a school building.
The statewide program will be available to all schools, public and private, with the exception of Philadelphia, which runs its own COVID-19 testing program.Boston-based Concentric by Ginkgo Bioworks, which operates school-based programs in Massachusetts, Maine,.